Yes, All Whites are Racist. No, Not all Whites are “Taught” to be Racist.

I admit it, and I agree. It is true that, on some level, all White people in the United States are quite likely to have at least some level of racism in their thinking.

I know this because I am White, and I have racism within myself. I am not immune. I have thought things racist about Black people. I know where I’ve found myself sometimes on occasion feeling a negative feeling when I see a Black person because “they might be a criminal”, or something like that, even though, of course, anyone might be a criminal.

However, what I want to say with this post is that I take objection to a common theme that seems to go around which is that this racism must have been taught, as in that one has parents who explicitly teach the person to think this way.

I was not taught that. I was never taught by my parents to flinch or to be weary of Blacks. My parents taught the opposite.

Instead, I picked it up through exposure to the media, and through reading comments on media.

Racism is insidious. It hooks you. It plays on your emotions. If there is a video showing a Black person being arrested for a crime, and a comment underneath talking about Blacks being “bad”, then it creates a strong, visceral message in favor of exactly that kind of thinking, so the next time you see a Black person in any context, you just might think the same way, even if they have not done any crime — and thus, if you were to act on that a step further, you would harm that entirely innocent Black person solely for happening to look, in a broad way, like the one that did the crime: that is, to harm them based on the color of their skin, and the shape of their facial features. And that’s wrong to do.

But here’s the thing. That’s what I refuse to do.

I resist it. I choose to resist. Each time this happens, I choose to resist it.

My point here is that some have said that racism is a choice, and I don’t feel that that describes how it worked with me. And I suspect a lot of others might, too, and so statements to that effect may have the effect of pushing them away from otherwise-valid points that may be made in pieces like that that they and we all need to hear. Especially when that renders such articles effectively a contradiction when they elsewhere suggest that racism cannot be escaped … yet if it’s a choice, then clearly you could just choose otherwise, and poof, it’d be gone, right?

So no. Racism is not a choice, or at least, it need not be a choice.

But resistance to racism is always a choice, as is the choice to not resist it.

And when made aware, and when finding one acts or thinks racistly, and one is confronted with that choice, what will one do?

That is what one needs to be concerned about.